Are you looking to spruce up your SMS marketing efforts? Introducing creativity into your texting campaigns can help your brand stand out, capture customers’ attention, and ultimately drive revenue.
Let’s look at 17 creative SMS marketing ideas to add a little oomph to your next campaign.
1. Starbucks: Personalized engagement
Starbucks, a leader in personalization and customization, offers over 170,000 ways to customize its drinks. In this SMS campaign, Starbucks personalizes its daily messages to subscribers based on their New Year’s resolution, fostering a deeper connection and increasing engagement.
The coffee chain encourages customers to sign up for daily alerts that are more personal to them. These alerts don’t specifically promote Starbucks, but the images included incorporate coffee-related imagery.
2. Working Class: Trivia for subscribers
What better way to promote your weekly trivia nights than sending questions directly to your customers? That’s precisely what a local restaurant in San Diego does for its text subscribers. The restaurant encourages contacts to reply to trivia questions with the correct answer for a chance to win a gift card. It also promotes its Wednesday trivia night, which brings in foot traffic on a slower dining day.
Take a page from this restaurant’s book to increase attendance at your events.
3. City Dog: A pet birthday message
What better way to a pet-parents heart than sending a warm message to their furry friend? City Dog, a pet-focused business, connects with its customers on a personal level by sending a happy birthday message to their pets, complete with a discount for the next grooming service.
While it doesn’t make sense to wish a pet happy birthday for every business, it’s a creative way for these industry businesses to stand out and drive loyalty. For businesses not in the pet industry, don’t be afraid to wish your customers happy birthday, as it can make them feel special and appreciated.
4. Marcus Theaters: Emoji puzzle
Another creative SMS example comes from a movie theater company. In this text message example, the movie theater encourages its loyal reward members to reply to a game for a chance to win free movie tickets. It takes a popular texting tool (emojis) and makes an engaging game. This is not only a creative way to stand out, but it also gets customers thinking about attending a movie at the theater.
This is a strategy that marketers could replicate in various industries. For example, an ecommerce brand could send an emoji puzzle in exchange for a free item or a percent-off coupon.
Read more: SMS marketing for ecommerce
5. Pacific Batch Cookie Co.: Recipe sharing promotion
In this holiday SMS marketing example, a baked goods company shares a recipe for its famous gingerbread cookies with its text subscribers. This is a creative way to spread holiday cheer and share a helpful resource with its customers. The best part is that the company also lets its customers know that they can order cookies if they don’t want to make their own. It’s a great way to engage customers, but also market your product.
6. Avenu: Exclusive sneak peek
Another innovative SMS marketing campaign comes from Avenu, a boutique clothing store. In this example, the retailer teases an exclusive sneak peek into its new sundress collection. A sneak peek campaign can encourage your SMS subscribers to engage with your brand and generate excitement about the new collection.
This is a great way to preview an item before it’s ready for launch. This campaign could be used across industries. For example, live entertainment could preview its summer lineup, a restaurant could preview a new item, and a painting business could preview a new technique.
7. Birdie Golf: Member-exclusive invite
In this exclusive MMS marketing campaign, a golf store extends a special invitation to its SMS subscribers for an in-person apparel launch. This type of event campaign is designed to create a sense of exclusivity for text subscribers, making them feel special and privileged. Inviting them to a member-only event can encourage them to stay subscribed to get more details and deals from your program.
This is also a strategy that could be applied to many industries. For example, a gym could invite its members to a holiday party or a SaaS company could invite its customers to test a new product for free.
8. Sundae Shift: Loyalty points boost
Another example of an SMS marketing campaign is offering a loyalty program. In this example, a local ice cream shop invites its members to try a new sundae in July for double punches. Over time, these punches add up to free ice cream and encourage repeat purchases.
This SMS marketing campaign encourages customers to visit and try a new product in exchange for loyalty rewards. This is a great way to reward loyalty without breaking the bank.
9. Alphalete: Personalized abandoned cart
While abandoned cart text messages are common marketing tactics, this particular one stands out for its top-notch personalization. Let’s look at a few reasons this cart recovery message from Alphalete is a strong one:
- It includes the exact item and size. The text message is highly personalized with the item and size a customer left in their cart.
- It creates FOMO. By including language like “get it before it’s gone,” Alphalete creates a sense that this particular item and size may run out of stock soon to encourage customers to complete a purchase.
- It links back to the abandoned cart. You want to make it easy for customers to complete checkout, and linking directly back to the cart in your text makes this easier.
10. FitZone: Referral program promotion
Referrals are a compelling marketing tactic for generating warm leads. In the example below, this creative text campaign, a gym encourages referrals in exchange for a discount on membership dues. The gym uses a text message blast to let its existing customers know they will receive a reward in exchange for any referrals.
Many membership and subscription-based industries can benefit from this campaign as it alerts customers to your referral program. Plus, texts are opened 98 percent of the time, making them a great way to get your message read.
11. Crunchi: Giveaway text example
Crunchi, a toxin-free cosmetic brand, runs a creative giveaway campaign to gain new text subscribers. This campaign encourages customers to enter their phone numbers to join the text program and win a chance to receive a free product.
People love free products, so running a giveaway is an effective way to build your subscriber base. You see that the first text to new text subscribers lets them know they were successfully entered as well.
12. RetroGlam: Creative book now example
A salon gets a hat tip for its book-now campaign, which is tailored heavily to the industry. Many salons are closed on Mondays, but this salon uses that known fact to encourage bookings. Saying customers can still book with them despite the closure is a fun way to get your client’s attention.
This is a creative campaign that can be replicated. For example, what’s a known fact your clients sometimes complain about in your industry? Use that language in your text to create a campaign around it.
Read more: SMS marketing for salons: Ideas and examples
13. Outdoor Voices: Creative CTA to create urgency
Another SMS marketing campaign worth talking about is from Outdoor Voices. The outdoor apparel company does a great job at fostering a sense of urgency with its ‘last call’ language and creative CTA. The “Go, go, go” CTA is innovative because you feel it creates urgency without being overly pushy.
Your business can replicate this creative campaign by thinking through unique CTAs that catch your customer’s attention. For example:
- Count me in
- I’m in
- Join free
- Follow the magic
14. Lovepop: Encouraging two-way communication
In this creative example from Lovepop, the card seller wants to learn more about what the customer wants to buy. This is a great engagement example to try when you’ve noticed a text subscriber hasn’t purchased anything from your brand yet. This campaign type can help you:
- Get to know your customer
- Better engage with text subscribers
- Make text subscribers feel special
15. Lovepop: A poem promotion
Content marketers know that creative writing stands out. Top-notch writing is precisely what Lovepop does in the following Valentine’s Day promotional example. In this text message example, the card company uses a poem to promote its new holiday card.
Use creative writing, including poetry, to make your text message marketing campaigns pop.
16. Alphalete: Re-engagement campaign
Use a creative re-engagement campaign to encourage repeat buyers and prevent customer churn. In the following example from Alphalete, the online retailer gives an exclusive discount code to a past customer who hasn’t purchased in a while. This helps the retailer boost sales and stay top of mind.
When creating a re-engagement campaign, make sure that the customer hasn’t made a purchase recently.
Read more: SMS marketing for retail
17. Anytime Fitness: Personalized class invite and creating FOMO
In this SMS marketing example, Anytime Fitness reaches out to a past customer to invite them to join a 6-week class challenge. Several components of this example make it creative and stand out, including:
- It makes the company human. Sharing a photo of your staff with a potential member helps humanize your company.
- It uses the customer’s first name. The company personalizes the message with the customer’s first name.
- It creates FOMO. This example shares that it only has seven spots left in its program. This generates some exclusivity and a fear of missing out.
Want more SMS marketing ideas? Check out these 21 SMS campaigns to exceed your goals.
7 tips for generating creative SMS marketing campaigns
The best marketing campaigns speak directly to your target audience and blend strategic thinking and creativity. Here are some tips to help you incorporate more creativity in your SMS marketing campaigns.
- Incorporate interactive elements. Many examples above encourage participants to reply and interact with a message. From responding to trivia questions to emoji puzzles, these marketing campaigns are memorable for the user because they’re interacting with your brand in a fun way.
- Use unique brand or industry knowledge. Use your insider knowledge of your brand and industry to create stand-out content. You know your brand and industry better than most, so use your color schemes, brand voice, or industry expertise to make a splash. In the text example above, a salon mentions that it’s closed on Mondays and how that may be frustrating for some.
- Add mixed media. You don’t have to stick to text-only messages. Use photos, GIFs, audio, or video to stand out. Messages with visual or audio attachments are called MMS; typically, they drive more engagement than text-only messages.
- Use humor. There’s a reason brands across the U.S. use humor in their marketing messages: it’s memorable. There’s even a psychological phenomenon behind it called the humor effect, which is a cognitive bias that causes you to remember things that make you laugh. Use humor in your SMS marketing campaigns to help you stand out and be memorable.
- Keep language in mind. Humor can help you stand out, but so can well-written content. Creative words that draw people in can significantly increase your SMS marketing campaigns. For example, you could write your customers a poem, create a jingle, or think outside the box for your CTA.
- Add user-generated content. Incorporating user-generated content into your SMS marketing messages can lead to creative text campaigns. For example, you can encourage users to text photos of themselves using your product for a chance to be featured. These are nice human touches to add to your marketing messages.
- Personalize and customize. Above all, one of the best ways to stand out is to personalize your marketing messages. You want each message to resonate with your contacts, and personalizing them and customizing them to each individual can help.
Check out more best practices for SMS marketing.
Craft and send creative SMS campaigns with Textline
Now that you’ve seen some examples to get your creative juices flowing, it’s time to craft the next SMS marketing campaign. But you’ll also need an SMS service provider to send marketing texts in bulk. Meet Textline, a top-rated SMS platform for marketing teams.
Textline’s multi-user platform lets teams quickly create, track, and automate marketing text messages. With features like mass texting, built-in metrics, and MMS, you can seamlessly get your creative marketing messages sent and optimized.
Try Textline for 14 days free and start driving results from your innovative SMS campaigns.
